"Looks like someone already thought of it,"
Gisella Killarney said as she set a double-tall mocha down in front of Melissa
Fox. Constitutional Evolution's redheaded gamer slid into the second chair at
the small table and glanced at the sketch her blond friend was touching up.
Both wore light jackets and jeans. They'd been chatting over an aimless walk
through Georgetown.

Melissa fuzzed out some graphite with her
thumb, then set her pencil down and reached for the cup. "For real? Sun Tzu's
been abducted by peaceniks?"

"Yep. The University of Victoria brought it up
at the 'Art of War' Symposium in Beijing. 1998. They dubbed it 'peacefare'. Or,
in the Chinese, ping-fa."

"Well, foo on that! Where'd they go with it?"

Gisella took a sip, and eyed a young stud just
entering the D.C. coffee shop. "Not where you were, that's for sure. But they
did make some good points we can use."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. Like recognizing that unilateral
disarmament ain't gonna cut it. But they seemed more concerned with remapping
Sun Tzu's underlying constants than with the process itself. The folks from BC
figured you still need some kind of moral law for the foundation of it all, and
then swapped out Heaven and Earth for science and relevant solutions as the
context it all happens in."

Melissa watched the busy barista behind the
counter for a few seconds, then flipped to a fresh page and fluttered the
pencil between her fingers. "What about leadership? I thought Sun Tzu was all
about top-down command and control, generals moving soldiers around, like pawns
in some live-fire board game."

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"He was. Of course, that's part of the process
he was modeling. For peacefare -- ping-fa -- the community is the actor. But they
wimped out and pegged it on nations, which cuts the people out of the action
anyway."

"Then let's lay out our own take on it, and see
where we end up." She flipped her pencil to writing position and tapped the
paper. "The way I see it, the
process Sun Tzu was modeling comes down to four activities. Assessing the
enemy's strengths and weaknesses, devising actions to exploit those weaknesses,
amassing tools to implement the actions, and then engaging the enemy."

He shrugged. "Only tangentially. Mind if I join
you? This sounds interesting."

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"Pull up a seat. What's your interest?"

He swung a chair from the next table around,
and slid in. "I'm Richard, by the way." He exchanged handshakes with them. "The
Art of War sort of fell on me one day at a book store. I was looking for
something on psychic self-defense, and thought it might be useful to get something
on strategy under my belt."

Ever since I learned to speak binary on a DIGIAC 3080 training computer, I've been involved with tech in one way or another, but there was always another part of me off exploring ideas and writing about them. Halfway to a BS in Space Technology at (more...)